


In Which Time Travel isn't Fun At All

by DinoDina



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 14:12:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17024133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DinoDina/pseuds/DinoDina
Summary: Percy can time travel — he just can't control it.





	In Which Time Travel isn't Fun At All

**Author's Note:**

> As per prompt, this contains some elements from The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The first time Percy travels through time, he's five years old and has broken a plate for the first time. It's nothing new to the Weasley household, which is riddled with children and is short on space, but it's  _Percy_. He's six in a few weeks, which means that he's growing up, and grown-up boys  _don't_  break plates.

They don't do other things, either—they don't read picture books anymore, they learn to leave their big brothers alone, they're role models for their younger siblings, they have their own toy brooms and play Quidditch with their friends.

Percy looks down at the broken plate and knows he's messed up. But that's nothing new. He's almost six, and he's been reading books without pictures for two years already—Bill and Charlie never laugh at him when he's there, but he  _knows_  they do when they're alone. He's not anywhere close to getting his own broom—which is  _fine_ , it really is, he knows they're poor and he's not  _that_ interested in Quidditch, anyway—and it's going to be a miracle if anyone ever looks up to him.

But anyway—one second he's staring at the broken plate and tears are beginning to fall down his face, and the next he's in the middle of a field looking up at the stars.

The shock is enough to calm him down.

Magic isn't strange, and this is magic—isn't it?

Percy calls for his mother, still calling her "Mum" because—well, he's not six yet.

She doesn't answer. Percy can feel the tears coming back. He's not been stuck without his mother yet, hasn't yet felt the pain of abandonment. The stars are good, yes; they're not allowed outside after dark, though Percy doesn't know  _why_. He's heard snippets of conversation, but only that: something about danger, about people coming to hurt them, some sort of war…

The outside—this warm, star-speckled outside—isn't  _dangerous_. Coming into the twins' room is dangerous because they can't control their magic; interrupting Bill when he's reading is dangerous because he has an affinity for foreign spells but doesn't know what they are; following Charlie is dangerous because he likes playing with creatures. This? This is nothing.

And yet—

Percy looks around. There's no one in sight. Nothing. Just the stars and him. He wishes for the broken plate, for the comfort of the Burrow. The outside is beautiful, it's quiet in a way his home can  _never_  be—but it feels wrong.

He takes one last look and closes his eyes—he's  _not_  crying, he's old enough not to cry—and opens them to see the carpet of the Burrow's sitting room, looking up to meet his parents' worried faces.

They're happy to see him, exclaiming over his sudden disappearance—his mother says, "Oh, Percy, you've been gone for  _hours_!"—and that isn't  _right_.

He furrows his brows in confusion as he's seen both of his parents do. "I was gone for five minutes."

They exchange a look Percy isn't supposed to see, but Percy's always been observant. It's why he doesn't remember the last picture book he read, why he's old enough to not be reading picture books in the first place. He wants to stomp his foot at them—he's old enough to be talked to!

The anger at being excluded brings with it shame. It's not a foreign emotion, but one he's all too familiar with; when Bill and Charlie treat him like he's too young, when Fred and George throw their toys at him, when he falls off Bill's second-hand broom—it always follows him.

_The broken plate!_ —Percy remembers with a jolt of that same shame.

He opens his mouth to tell them and apologize, but his parents are looking too serious as they say, "Percy, we need to tell you something."

* * *

The plate is easily repaired and Percy doesn't think about it further. His parents' revelation, on the other hand…

Percy's always known he was different. He doesn't like Quidditch, he's too quiet and too loud at the same time, he doesn't like picture books and likes cleaning his room—but this? This is something completely different.

His parents call it a "genetic condition" and it is. Kind of.

Percy has yet to meet a family member with the same affliction, but the fact remains that he can travel through time—and can't control it one whit. He's born with it, his parents tell him.

(None of his siblings are, and what Percy doesn't tell them can't hurt them—they'll laugh, or worse: be jealous, hate him, be disgusted by him.)

Percy doesn't know what he hates more: the fact that there's something in his life that he can't control or the fact that he was careless enough to break a plate. Either way, he tries not to think about that day.

It's hard though.

He blinks out of existence if he's too stressed out or tired, if he's too immersed in a book or in the middle of helping with chores. Months pass in between his time-slips, but once he time-traveled every day for a month.

He catches his parents once discussing not sending him to Hogwarts.

He disappears and doesn't come back for five weeks, spending them with a kind family in the 56th century, and they don't bring it up again—he  _will_  go to Hogwarts if it's the last thing he does, he will  _not_  be that abnormal.

* * *

Looking around at his lonely flat, Percy desperately wishes to disappear. But he doesn't. He can't, no matter how hard he tries, and he knows that even before he does.

If only he could go back in time— _oh, the irony!_ —and apologize. Tell his parents that he doesn't think they're traitors. Tell them that he loves them. He can go back and accept the Christmas jumper he sent back to his mother. He can rip up the letter he wrote to Ron.

It's easier said than done, and at the end of the day all Percy has is his tears and frustration. It's humiliating—humiliating because he's always known what to do, always had a plan and the ability to execute it, and without those plans and his previous confidence, what is he?

He curls his lip in displeasure and goes to bed.

He wakes up in the 13th century with nothing but his wand and the clothes on his back and waits to go home, knowing that there's nothing waiting there for him.

* * *

It's only fitting that Fred dies right after Percy reunites with his family. He brings chaos wherever he goes—Percy, not Fred; never Fred, who was joyful and considerate even during his more cruel pranks—and it's only natural that he gets his little brother killed.

He misses the funeral because he's travelled back into his own timeline and is stuck watching his brothers struggle to open their joke shop.

He gets as far as the doorway once; it's fate, common sense, fear, and the universe that stop him from going inside. He turns and runs away—turns his back on his family one more time even after promising himself he wouldn't.

The first rule of time-traveling is that he can't change anything. It said so in one of his father's Muggle books—

"Terribly smart, those Muggles, aren't they?"

The voice is Umbridge's; he stumbles past her as he enters Knockturn Alley, hollowly laughing as she crudely finishes his thought.

Six months he spends skulking outside Weasley's Wizard Wheezes before he's flung back to his own time, to George pounding on the door of his flat—to George marching in and hitting him, and it's the first thing Percy's properly felt in months; he deserves it for seeing Fred, for being selfishly happy about his condition.

" _How could you miss it_?" George demands, and Percy is disgusted in the realisation that he  _is_  happy!—He is  _so_  happy that he missed the funeral, that he didn't have to say goodbye to his brother one last time.

* * *

"I saw Fred," he tells George a week later. His face is still bruised from their previous conversation, but… it's  _George_.

He can't  _not_  tell him, no matter how selfishly he wants to keep it to himself.

_When you opened the shop… I went back in time and I saw you, and I_ wish  _I could take you but it's going to happen so many more times and I can't face that knowing that you won't ever see Fred again. I'm sorry. For leaving and for getting Fred killed_ — _please forgive me, but you don't have to. Can we talk?_

Percy wants to say that and so much more, but he just toes the ground in front of George's door, at a loss for words. He takes a deep breath and looks up—then down, because George is shorter than him.

"I have something to tell you."

It's not about him anymore. Percy smiles at the nod George gives him and goes inside; they have years to make up for and maybe they never will—but Percy can try.


End file.
